Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became Whyte's (...) professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Much of Volume 1, edited by Green's pupil R. L. Nettleship and published in 1885, consists of Green's work on David Hume . In his essay, 'Introductions to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature' , Green gives a detailed critique of Hume's metaphysical thought. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green worked on the commission which led to the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, and supported the temperance movement, the (...) extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students of philosophy and political thought. This collection of Green's writings, published in three volumes from 1885 to 1888, was edited by R. L. Nettleship, one of his Balliol students. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became Whyte's (...) professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Much of Volume 1, edited by Green's pupil R. L. Nettleship and published in 1885, consists of Green's work on David Hume. In his essay, 'Introductions to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature', Green gives a detailed critique of Hume's metaphysical thought. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became (...) Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 2, published in 1886, consists of Green's unpublished lecture notes. The Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation drew criticism upon Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, for his editorial interventions: the idea of 'common good' was thought to vary significantly here from Green's other writings. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became (...) Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 3, published in 1888, contains a memoir by Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, drawing on Green's recollections, as well as the memories of friends and family. The rest of the volume consists of essays on topics ranging from Aristotle to Christian dogma. (shrink)

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential English thinkers of his time, and he made significant contributions to the development of political liberalism. Much of his career was spent at Balliol College, Oxford: having begun as a student of Benjamin Jowett, he later acted effectively as his second-in-command at the college. Interested for his whole career in social questions, Green supported the temperance movement, the extension of the franchise, and the admission of women to university education. He became (...) Whyte's professor of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1878, and his lectures had a lasting influence on a generation of students. Volume 2, published in 1886, consists of Green's unpublished lecture notes. The Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation drew criticism upon Nettleship, Green's pupil and editor, for his editorial interventions: the idea of 'common good' was thought to vary significantly here from Green's other writings. (shrink)

Philosophers and others have often debated whether we have freewill: i.e. whether (in a sense I shall try to elucidate) our power to choose between X and Y is radically undetermined, so that if we choose X we yet might have chosen Y, and vice versa. My concern is not with that question but with a hypothetical one which arises from it: if we had such freewill, what implications, if any, would, that fact have for the sciences. My argument concentrates (...) on the social sciences, since the phenomena with which they deal inevitably involves human choice. (shrink)

Remembered today primarily for his commentaries on Plato, R.L. Nettleship was a fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1869 to 1892. And, while he was one of the past century’s better known interpreters of Plato, Nettleship’s influence extends well beyond the study of Greek philosophy. Although his life was cut short in its prime and saw the publication of no major works expressive of his own views, it is to Nettleship that we owe the existence (...) of T.H. Green’s collected Works and the book-length “Memoir” that introduces these volumes. And, despite its being ignored by later writers, Nettleship’s “Lectures on Logic” remains one of the most accessible accounts of the idealist theory of knowledge that came to dominate late nineteenth century British philosophy. (shrink)

Famous for the number-theoretic first-order statement known as Goodstein's theorem, author R. L. Goodstein was also well known as a distinguished educator. With this text, he offers an elementary treatment that employs Boolean algebra as a simple medium for introducing important concepts of modern algebra. The text begins with an informal introduction to the algebra of classes, exploring union, intersection, and complementation; the commutative, associative, and distributive laws; difference and symmetric difference; and Venn diagrams. Professor Goodstein proceeds to a detailed (...) examination of three different axiomatizations, and an outline of a fourth system of axioms appears in the examples. The final chapter, on lattices, examines Boolean algebra in the setting of the theory of partial order. Numerous examples appear at the end of each chapter, with full solutions at the end. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explore a number of conceptual issues surrounding genetic testing. It looks at the meaning of the terms, genetic information and genetic testing in relation to the definition set out by the Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing in the UK, and by the Task Force on Genetic Testing in the USA. It argues that the special arrangements that may be required for the regulation of genetic tests should not be determined by reference to the nature or technology (...) of the test, but by considering those morally relevant features that justify regulation. Failure to do so will lead to the regulation of genetic tests that need not be regulated, and would fail to cover other tests which should be regulated. The paper also argues that there is little in the nature of the properties of gene tests, using DNA or chromosomes, that in itself justifies a special approach. (shrink)

Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that ‘conscious experience’, if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real (...) than the phenomena we misdescribe as material. Nor does he suppose that consciousness depends on language (as Stoics and modern materialists have sometimes said): wordless experience is actually superior. And much of what counts towards our present consciousness is to be discarded. It is betternotto remember most of what now seems more significant to us; better to discard images; better that the intellect be ‘drunk’ than ‘sober’, losing any sense of separation between subject and object. The goal of the Plotinian intellectual is to join ‘the dance of immortal love’, but it is a mark of the good dancer that she is not conscious of what she does. There is therefore a strange confluence between Plotinus and modern materialists:ourexperience at least is transitory, deceitful, epiphenomenal, and ‘reality’ is to be encountered when we have shed our illusions. (shrink)

The notion of a ‘cosmopolites’ has diverged quite far from its philosophical origins, but may eventually serve a similar function. The hope of a global peace or any sort of global managemen...

The notion of autonomy commonly employed in medical ethics literature and practices is inadequate on three fronts: it fails to properly identify nonautonomous actions and choices, it gives a false account of which features of actions and choices makes them autonomous or nonautonomous, and it provides no grounds for the moral requirement to respect autonomy. In this paper I offer a more adequate framework for how to think about autonomy, but this framework does not lend itself to the kinds of (...) practical application assumed in medical ethics. A general problem then arises: the notion of autonomy used in medical ethics is conceptually inadequate, but conceptually adequate notions of autonomy do not have the practical applications that are the central concern of medical ethics. Thus, a revision both of the view of autonomy and the practice of “respect for autonomy” are in order. (shrink)

While students of idealism will be pleased to see another important text back in print, the Cambridge Scholars Press reissue of F.H. Bradley’s Principles of Logic will, I suspect, find only a limited audience. Although the book is nicely bound and printed on what appears to be a high quality acid-free paper, CSP — surely for reasons of economy — has chosen to compress the text’s original five hundred thirty-four pages to three-hundred fourteen, entirely changing the pagination. What has also (...) changed in the CSP edition are the page headers. Sometimes the CSP edition provides a fuller account of the chapter contents than the original; often, though, the new headers tell us less. (shrink)

‘Jason…chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill, or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea but cowering before her later threats and curses, coldly efficient in the time-serving murder of an (...) unsuspecting child , reluctant even in marriage.’ So Carspecken put the case against Jason's heroism. In the face of such an indictment, Lawall's plea in mitigation, ‘it must be admitted that [Jason] often reveals the qualities of a true gentleman’, seems somehow inadequate. Criticism since Carspecken has found various overlapping categories for Jason which both take account of the earlier negative judgements and preserve the centrality of his ‘personality’ and character in the poem: Jason is the quiet diplomat who works through consensus rather than force, his is a heroism of sex-appeal, he is an anti-hero, the embodiment of Sceptic ‘suspension of judgement’, or, alternatively, he is ‘one of us’, credible and lifelike. Carspecken himself tried a different tack: the poem is concerned not with individual heroism but with the heroism of the group. (shrink)

I propose to begin with some fairly unexciting and uncontroversial remarks about possibility-statements, and then in their light to examine two problems philosophers have raised about certain statements of this kind which might be made in Christian theology where it touches on the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The proposition that a decreasing sequence of ordinals necessarily terminates has been given a new, and perhaps unexpected, importance by the rôle which it plays in Gentzen's proof of the freedom from contradiction of the “reine Zahlentheorie.” Gödel's construction of non-demonstrable propositions and the establishment of the impossibility of a proof of freedom from contradiction, within the framework of a certain type of formal system, showed that a proof of freedom from contradiction could be found only by transcending the axioms (...) and proof processes of that formal system. Gentzen's proof succeeds by utilisingtransfinite inductionto prove that certain sequences of reduction processes, enumerated by ordinals less than ε (the first ordinal to satisfy ε = ὡ) are finite. Were it possible to provethe restricted ordinal theorem, that a descending sequence of ordinals, less thanε, is finite, in Gentzen's “reine Zahlentheorie,” then it would be possible to determine a contradiction in that number system. In his paper, Gentzen proves the theorem of transfinite induction, which he requires, by an intuitive argument. There is also a method of reducing transfinite induction, for ordinals less than ε, to a number-theoretic principle given by Hilbert and Bernays, and a similar method by Ackermann. None of these proofs of transfinite induction isfinitist. (shrink)

Alberto Cortes, in [1], attempts to show that Leibniz's Principle of The Identity of Indiscernibles is a principle restricted to individuals, and that photons appear to violate L. L is stated by Leibniz as “no two substances are completely similar, or differ solo numero.” In second-order quantification theory with identity L becomes.

Mr D. H. Mellor, in his article of this title in Religious Studies , Vol. 5 , distinguishes three senses of words such as ‘probable’ which might be used in a religious context, especially in that of attempted theistic proofs: statistical, subjective, and inductive probability. In each case he concludes that it is misleading to use these words in such contexts at all. With his discussion of the second I do not wish to quarrel; but there seem to me to (...) be serious defects in his discussions of the first and third. (shrink)